“You grow up imagining all these writers live in mansions and have their private, elegant writing rooms. But the working reality for most writers is not that different from the working reality for working class to middle class people.”

Editor, book-blogger and podcaster Ron Hogan joins the show to talk about his 20-year history with the literary internet, launching Beatrice.com, interviewing his favorite writers, podcasting Life Stories, taking the wrong lessons from the work of Harlan Ellison, defending Hudson Hawk, retaining his inner fanboy, discovering romance fiction, overcoming gender/race imbalances in publishing (and podcasting), using Foucault as cover for being a pugnacious asshole, getting to meet James Ellroy, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, and Cornel West, and generally trying to overthrow the hegemony. Give it a listen!

“We severely underestimated the ability of corporate media to assimilate challenges to it.”

But first, Josh Alan Friedman offers us his reminiscences and reflections on the great Joe Franklin, who passed away last weekend at the age of 88. Josh wrote a wonderful piece on Joe in 2012, so I called him down in Texas and invited him to tell us about this legendary celebrity fixture of New York. (That’s “Handsome Dick” Manitoba” with Joe in March 2014.) (Oh, and check out our first Josh Alan Friedman episode over here!)

Ron Hogan helped create the literary Internet by launching Beatrice.com in 1995. He is currently an editor at Regan Arts, acquiring both fiction and nonfiction titles. He maintains an active presence in New York City’s literary scene, hosting and curating events such as Lady Jane’s Salon, the first monthly reading series dedicated to romance fiction. (Previously, he curated a series of conversations between authors and bloggers at Brooklyn’s Greenlight Bookstore.)

He was a columnist at Shelf Awareness, and has written book reviews and feature stories for publications like Tor.com, the Dallas Morning News, Buzzfeed and The Daily Beast. He spent several years writing about the business side of publishing as a senior editor for GalleyCat, then briefly worked with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt as their director of e-marketing strategy. He speaks frequently at book festivals and publishing conferences about how to make the best use of social networking tools, advances in digital publishing, and other transformative trends in the publishing industry.

Credits: This episode’s music is Here and Now by Letters to Cleo, on account of all the Gen X references we made. The conversation was recorded on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom H5 digital recorder. I recorded the intro and outro on a Blue Yeti USB Microphone. Processing was done in Audacity and Logic Pro. Photo of Mr. Hogan by me.